Agricultural biotechnology, and particularly plant biotechnology, has become recognized as one of the principal areas for the application of biotechnology techniques. Systems exist for transforming plant cells and regenerating complete plants from the transformed cells; structural gene and gene regulatory regions continue to be identified; and the need for plants with genetically engineered traits such as insect resistance and drought resistance remains strong.
A problem with the expression of foreign genes in plants is the clonal variation in the expression of the same gene in independent transformants: a problem referred to as "position effect" variation. No completely satisfactory method of obviating this problem has yet been developed, and there is accordingly a continued need for solutions to this problem.